If you need to ensure that only long words don't peek outside their container, you have no good options: Either you're breaking the word across lines with no hyphenation, or you're hyphenating every word that hits the container edge regardless of length.

I propose that an additional value is added to either hyphens or overflow-wrap, allowing for hyphenation only to occur for words that are too long to fit in their container, leaving all other words to flow normally.

Either of these examples should do the trick:

overflow-wrap: hyphenate-word;
hyphens: overflow;

Since browsers that don't support hyphens rely on the overflow-wrap property to break the words across lines, adding this feature to that property may be a deal-breaker. Adding it to the hyphens property might therefore make more sense.

May the CSS overlords discuss and consider the issue and find a solution!